Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Blinded by science
Not an April Fool’s Day joke
NASA’s Cassini has imaged a hexagonal structure centered over Saturn’s North Pole:
The feature was noticed over twenty years ago by Voyager 1 and 2, so it’s not an ephemeral finding. From the NASA site,
“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”
It’s not a small structure, either — nearly four Earths could fit inside it. (The Earth’s diameter is nearly 8000 miles, and this thing is 15,000 miles across. Four Earths would rub shoulders and spill over the confines of the hex. But, still!)
By contrast, at Saturn’s South Pole, they’ve found a “hurricane with a giant eye.”
There’s even a video (scroll down a bit).
Cool!
D.
Life, meet Art. Art, Life.
Live blogging tonight!
Jake and I have been sharing yucks and generally having fun with the Sam and Max games. These retro mysteries are all about the wisecracks; the puzzles are usually trivial.
In the first game, Culture Shock, Sam and Max contend with a trio of former child stars who are roaming our protagonists’ neighborhood, promoting the mesmerizing video of cult-leader-wannabe Brady Culture. The video promises to teach viewers “Eye-Bo fitness,” eye exercises guaranteed to get you the girl/boy/job/foot massage of your dreams.
As if anyone would believe eye exercises could improve your life. Crazy, huh?
Meanwhile, purely in the interests of research (natch!), this afternoon I googled “psychology adults abused as children.” This search led me to this Amazon page for EMDR in the Treatment of Adults Abused as Children.
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — Eye-Bo by any other name. What’s the big idea? One reviewer writes,
EMDR helps you to integrate the two halves of your brain and to heal from trauma that is trapped in your nervous system. EMDR is a very effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It isn’t quite as spectacular as the books make it seem, but it really can work.
Hmm. How does that work, again?
EMDR helps you to recognize that the abuse happened in the past, and is not happening in the present. Therefore it is easier for you to process your traumatic experiences because you don’t have to live as if the abuse is still happening.
I see. It’s that old right-brain/left-brain thingamobob. But are there any peer reviewed reports to support EMDR? After all, these are vulnerable patients who come to their therapist following a childhood of victimization. No one would take advantage of such folks by taking their money in exchange for unproven methods . . . would they?
As usual, Quackwatch has the dope:
Only one published study has directly compared EMDR with a no-treatment control group. Jensen (1994) randomly assigned Vietnam veterans with PTSD to either an EMDR group or a control group that was promised delayed treatment. EMDR produced lower within-session SUDs [Subjective Units of Distress] ratings compared with the control condition, but did not differ from the control session in its effect on PTSD symptoms. In fact, the level of interviewer-rated PTSD symptoms increased in the EMDR group following treatment.
The author concludes,
The proponents of EMDR have yet to demonstrate that EMDR represents a new advance in the treatment of anxiety disorders, or that the eye movements purportedly critical to this technique constitute anything more than pseudoscientific window dressing . . . .
Because of the limited number of controlled studies on EMDR, both practitioners and scientists should remain open to the possibility of its effectiveness. Nevertheless, the standard of proof required to use a new procedure clinically should be considerably higher than the standard of proof required to conduct research on its efficacy. This is particularly true in the case of such conditions as PTSD, for which existing treatments have already been shown to be effective. The continued widespread use of EMDR for therapeutic purposes in the absence of adequate evidence can be seen as only another example of the human mind’s willingness to sacrifice critical thinking for wishful thinking.
And now I get to kick back and watch. Will any EMDR fanatics come out of the woodwork to tear me a new one? Folks are always rarin’ to testify, it seems.
D.
Chimparilla, anyone?
By now, you’ve heard of catdog.
No, not that catdog. This one:
Owner Cassia Aparecida de Souza says her moggie Mimi got pregnant after mating with a neighbour’s dog.
Cassia, 18, says Mimi had a litter of six babies — three cat-like and the rest looking like dogs.
The cat creatures died after the birth in Passo Fundo, Brazil, but the doggies survived. Geneticists are testing blood samples. Unlikely hybrids have happened before but always between closely related species.
Yes, like horses (chromosome number 64) and donkeys (chromosome number 62), or lions (38) and tigers (38). Hybrids are possible between closely related species — here is a cool list of documented hybrids at Wikipedia. My favorite: the wolphin, a cross between a bottlenose dolphin and a false killer whale. Here’s a top ten hybrid list, with cool pictures.
My son and I are fans of Impossible Creatures, a computer game in which you create all manner of funky hybrids and put them into combat with other funky hybrids. The year is 1937 and you play Rex Chance, scientist/adventurer a la Indiana Jones. Rex, along with the beautiful Lucy, face off against eeevil entrepreneur Upton Julius on one island setting after another.
Yes, you can make catdogs in Impossible Creatures, provided your dog is a wolf, your cat, a tiger. Eh. Close enough.
But, back to real life hybrids. If hybrid success depends on a close genetic relationship and similar chromosome number, why not a chimparilla (chimps, N = 48, gorillas, N = 48), or, for that matter, hybrids with humans (N = 46)? Oliver aside, there have been no documented chumans. (Humpanzees?) Nor can I find any humarillas.
If you search the web for the answer to the ape/human breeding question, the most common comment is, “Could never happen, they have different chromosome numbers.” But the horse/donkey hybrid, AKA mule, gives the lie to that argument.
Back to catdog. Cats and dogs aren’t closely related; the lines diverged about 50 million years ago. And their chromosome numbers aren’t remotely similar (cats, N = 38; dogs, N = 78).
Sorry, catdog aficionados; this puppy ain’t gonna fly. Or meow.
D.
Equal time: good science
Also in Nature 6 July 2006: a listing of the top 5 science blogs based on Technorati ranking. Here are the links, along with a quick blurb on what’s happening on their blogs today.
Weird science
I’m not a PETA kind of person. Biomedical research would limp along without animal experimentation. Nevertheless, I prefer to assume the relevant supervisorial committees are doing their jobs preventing cruelty and minimizing unnecessary pain.
From the 6 July 2006 issue of Nature, reporting on an article appearing in Science:
Matthias Wittlinger of the University of Ulm, Germany, and his colleagues show that Saharan desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, use a pedometer to count their strides. The authors allowed a group of ants to march from their nest to an experimental food site. Then, the ants were captured, and the researchers either shortened the ants’ legs by amputation or elongated them by gluing stilts made of pig bristles. Both types of altered ants misjudged the distance home — the ants on stumps undershot while the ants on stilts went too far. Further work on the accuracy of the ant pedometer is planned.
Perhaps you don’t feel much sympathy for ants. I know I don’t. Still, the thought of these researchers snipping off bits of ants’ legs, six little snips per ant, no doubt dozens or maybe hundreds of ants, brings to my mind the classic sociopathy triangle: fire-setting, bedwetting, and cruelty to small animals. As kids, these researchers were probably ant-obsessed. How many of them turned their magnifying glasses into killing machines?
Here’s another — also a Nature report on a Science article. This one is even more worrisome, IMO.
A mouse watching a cage-mate writhe in pain will writhe more itself, an observation that Jeffrey Mogil and his team at McGill University in Montreal conclude is evidence of rodent empathy.
The researchers tested mice in twos, giving one or both mildly painful shots of acetic acid. If the two were strangers, they behaved as if they were on their own. But if they had lived together for a few weeks, and both got a shot, they both showed more abdominal constrictions, termed writhing, than when given a shot alone. The effect vanished if the roomies could not see one another.
I doubt either of these studies rises to the level of ridiculousness necessary to win an Ig Nobel Prize, but they both bothered me on a gut level. And mice? I like them even less than ants. Nasty beasties.
D.
Hobbit update
They’re defaming my ancestors.
A recent issue of Science (19 May, Vol. 312, pages 983-984) dishes on the controversy of Indonesia’s Homo floresiensis, the one-meter-tall humans who “made stone tools and hunted dwarf elephants 18,000 years ago.” Anatomist Susan Larson of Stony Brook University reported at a recent meeting that H. floresiensis seems to be descended from Homo erectus, while paleoanthropologist Robert D. Martin of the Field Museum (Chicago) “argue[s] that the single skull is that of a mondern human suffering from microcephaly.”
Microcephaly. Teensy head syndrome. (Next time you want to insult someone with language that escapes them, call them microcephalic.) I’d give you a link, but in my opinion, there’s nothing more disturbing than images of malformed babies.
“More surprises are still to come,” reports Elizabeth Culotta. “[William] Jungers said in his talk that LB1 [the H. floresiensis skeleton] includes an essentially complete foot, something not identified previously, and hinted that the foot is extremely large. Indonesia’s hobbits, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional creatures, may have trekked about on big hairy feet.”
Now that is more like it.
In other science news, Elizabeth Pennisi reports that human and chimp lineages may have split only 6 million years ago. More controversial still is the claim that “early hominids interbred with their chimp cousins.”
Hey, I’ve got news for you. They still do.
King Kong: the academic review
Time for a quickie before my meeting.
Know what I love about the journals Science and Nature? They’re not above reviewing popular books and movies, provided there’s some shred of scientific relevance. For example, back in ’04, physicist/climatologist Myles Allen reviewed The Day After Tomorrow (Nature 429:347-348), which you’ll remember as the uber-silly global warming movie with decent special effects and Jake Gyllenhaal as the braniac son of Dennis Quaid — the kid who failed calculus because he solved all the test questions in his head and didn’t bother to write them down — and what kind of idiot doesn’t learn in elementary school to show his work? But anyway.
Myles Allen wrote a kickass review. I still refer back to it on occasion to learn style points. I especially like his two-liner, “A medic watching this film would learn as much about climate as I would learn about cardiology watching ER — not nothing, but I would prefer the surgeon standing over me with a scalpel, or the politician pondering my petrol taxes, to have had some additional training. So I find the fuss about the film’s possible impact on climate policy rather disturbing.”
I gotta say, it’s fun getting the skinny from folks who know:
Holy crapoli
This story is either the biggest thing since the discovery of nuclear fission or the dumbest thing since cold fusion. (more…)
Sociobiology of Boobage 101
In 1983, Vincent Sarich taught a course at Berkeley called “The Evolution of Human Behavior.” He let us know on the first day that the class was experimental. He had some rough ideas about course content — some things he wanted to talk about, a handful of ideas he wanted to share.
Sounded like good clean fun, and we really did have a blast, too. Professor Sarich (that grizzly teddy bear on the left) was good to his word. He talked, we listened — and argued with him, of course.
For a final exam, he asked us to write three short essays on topics of our own choosing. They had to be somewhat relevant to the course, but beyond that, we were on our own. My three topics:
Genius, a maladaptive trait
Why are hiccups contagious?
The Road Warrior: a sociobiologic perspective
I got an A+.
Funny thing, though. I’ve only retained two things from that class. One is a concept: the Tragedy of the Commons (see the Wikipedia article here, or the original article here), which suggests that folks will always choose their own self interest over the common good, even to their ultimate detriment. If you’re curious about this, I recommend you start with the Wiki article, since it is shorter than the original article and has considerably more perspective.
The other thing I learned in Professor Sarich’s class is why men love cleavage. “I want to talk about breasts today,” he said, except that with his slight speech impediment it came out “breashts.” “Why are they so appealing?”
The traditional sociobiological interpretation is that large breasts are desirable because they translate to well fed babies. Sociobiology was big back then. Still is, for all I know. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, here’s the basic idea. Our behavior is ruled by our genes, and in particular, our genes’ desire to pass on more of themselves to the next generation. “But,” you argue, “genes are not sentient.” Pshaw! Genes don’t have to be sentient to find ways of furthering their own interests.
Back to boobs. Professor Sarich contended that the sociobiologists were wrong. Men don’t love breasts because they want well fed babies. Men crave hooters because of a cross-wiring problem. You see, men get boobs confused with butts:
always gave me wood.
It’s gotta be true.
D.